Marlboro Print

I want to talk about beauty, feelings, life stories, and contradictions—everything that makes us human. The central focus of my creations is the emotions that are omnipresent on this planet, regardless of creed or language; even before we learn to speak, we already demonstrate emotion. I explore not just the 'noble' feelings, but any and all feelings expressed in the contemporary world, amidst the intersections of social media, television, film, and music. Conveying strength, beauty, and everyday life through characters and their clothing, I use abstraction to show that reality is malleable. It may take decades to change, but it is real. The flowers present in all my works—whether featuring a character or a piece of clothing—convey emotions, dreams, and the hope of changing the reality of a community or oneself, recovering one's beauty and self-esteem. My artistic motivation stems from a dream common to every child of my social background: to change our family's situation and give them a better life. In art, I found this opportunity. Initially, I created to deal with my reality and my disillusionment with the academic world. Art called to me; I had to do it, even without fully knowing what I was doing at first. Nowadays, my art deals with emotions by creating images of people who, in Brazil's not-so-distant colonial past, were denied them, producing anguish and pain in their bodies. I recognize myself in an environment that remains largely unchanged—both at the university I attended and when walking down the street—feeling a certain strangeness in places where I still feel I don't fit in. My art is a way of resisting this. Resisting and reclaiming my humanity is what motivates my creation, even though during the colonial period this was stolen from my ancestors: Native Brazilians—the original people of South America—and Africans brought here against their will. My proposal is to work with the emotions of the body marginalized by colonization, creating an image that represents the beauty of these bodies, their contradictions, and their hopes. These are the same bodies described by colonizers as 'savage,' devoid of feelings or emotions. I portray how culture intersects with us and interferes with how we interpret and deal with the emotions that arise. Even if our hopes and dreams are ripped away or manipulated by algorithms, television, or other forms of communication, the emotions that arise are still as present as the dead flowers in my work.